You SURE it was 850MB ?? The PR133+ was an early cheap Intel clone; more likely you had an 85MB HDD; my mums first PC was a PR300 Win95 based business machine, and came with a 200MB HDD that later ended up in my Amiga 500.

The mighty Commodore64 and it's 64k ram was my first computer at home, kind of hard to explain to younger folk now how amazing that was at the time.  I particularly liked the fact that each weekend my brother and I would go to the local computer shop and look through the games and choose one based on the the blurb on the back, many of them would be rubbish but then we'd be back next week and there were always gems to find.  

 

After that it was an Amiga 500+ then the first Windows PC, a Cyrix PR133+ powered system with 850MB hard drive, 8MB of ram, 8x CD-rom drive (remember when cd-rom drive speed was a big thing?!) and a 15in 800x600 display.

 

From one point of view you could say kids are lucky these days having pretty incredible technology at their fingers, even as someone who works in technology I still find it pretty amazing what I can do with a mobile phone now in terms of being able to watch pretty much any TV program or film almost anywhere at very high quality when I think back to how excited I was when we got our first video player...we could play back TV programs whenever we wanted!  On the other hand I think it makes it hard for kids to understand technology because they haven't seen the progression and they don't understand the basics, there are amusing 'kids react' videos where they give old technology to teenagers and younger to see what they think and they of course mostly rubbish it.  However on one video where they were showing them 56K modems and what the internet was like in the late 90's, they turned it on its head a bit and asked the kids how did they use the internet?  They all replied they just opened a browser on their tablet or PC, when they were pushed about what was a router or DSL modem they didn't have a clue. 

 

John

I remember those days well - because games were easier to write, programmers could knock games out a lot quicker and were more willing to try something different (Jeff Minter with LLamasoft is one that springs to mind). The focus was always on playability in those days

We had a Tandy TRS-80 Color computer MK1 which my dad upgraded from 8K RAM to 16K RAM.

 

Went from that to a heavily upgraded BBC Model B with external processor box and Teletext upgrade, before getting a Sinclair PC-2 with its 8086 processor.

Dragon 32.  Actually a good bit of kit by the standards of the time but for some reason it was difficult to find cassette players that would work with it.  Learnt basic on it and wrote several programmes.  Went through the home build phase but have now moved on to Macs.

Love hearing about all these old computers, how times have changed.

I was a bit geeky I think because I used to play on the display models and type in a routine to flash the main screen and outer border different colours along with sounds to match on the old commodores. It was all about "peeks" and "pokes", wonder if anyone understands that?

I discovered beer n women before coming back to computers and got hold of a Beeb B+ with 128k sideways ram, 512k ram disks, twin floppy disk drives, co processor and a cub monitor. Had my first ever mouse with that too, it came with an art program. What an awesome machine lol.

Then along came pc's 486sx25, pentium 75 and I'll get bored typing.

Used to love playing with z80 processors mounted on breadboards at college and then programing up with machine code. Got a telling off at college for chatting to a girl via the echonet network that connected all the beebs in the classroom.

The good old days lol

Dragon 32.  Actually a good bit of kit by the standards of the time but for some reason it was difficult to find cassette players that would work with it.

 

Ah, another Dragon owner. As you say, not a bad machine, but it was fairly quickly outperformed by the C64

I remember those days well - because games were easier to write, programmers could knock games out a lot quicker and were more willing to try something different (Jeff Minter with LLamasoft is one that springs to mind). The focus was always on playability in those days

Loved some of the Minter stuff - still follow him on twitter

As for playability on 64 etc I remember buying Wizball on c64 then later getting it on Amiga 500

Amiga version such a disappointment.looked nice but nowhere near as good to play

Learned FORTRAN on an ICL 1900 at college, 

Regards, Mike

I learnt Fortran at school in the late 60's I remember writing my first program with it, to calculated the multiples of 3     that was done on those small punch type cards if anyone remembers them   

Loved some of the Minter stuff - still follow him on twitter

As for playability on 64 etc I remember buying Wizball on c64 then later getting it on Amiga 500

Amiga version such a disappointment.looked nice but nowhere near as good to play

Wizball was amazing on the C64 - can't imagine anyone coming out with anything remotely like that now.

 

One I loved as well was Speedball

Wizball was amazing on the C64 - can't imagine anyone coming out with anything remotely like that now.

One I loved as well was Speedball

Novelties like Wizball usually end up on xbla or psn network nowadays

As for Speedball I can never work out which one I liked best - 1 or 2...

I still play number 2 on me 360 but my fave game on Amiga had to be Dino Dini's Goal!

Fantastic

Atari 65xe. God knows how it got me into computers as it was an utter pain in the arse.

I'm sure this is the one that you had to leave the room for it to load a game?

I think there's still the bones of two commodores up in the loft but the first was the Atari followed by a 16+4 then c64 and later an Amiga, we were given a vic 20 somewhere in there as well. Still play a number of Amiga games every now and then, Took the kids to Portugal over Easter and they sat inside playing monkey island 2 for most of the week.

The 386 dx 2 33 was the first PC though, if I compressed windows. 3.11 for work groups I could fit command and conquer on the 120meg hdd, it was sloooooow but it worked

I still have a green screen laptop with detachable keyboard in the loft too, god knows what it is though.

really some of you blokes make laugh, still have all these old computers in your loft/attics its amazing really to be honest.

 

I must admit when we  moved to  the new house is was amazing what we had in the attic, old pc, vcr, monitors even some old 78 records.....

 

So yes I am just as bad.. so I'll shut up     

Learned FORTRAN on an ICL 1900 at college.....

 

I learnt Fortran at school in the late 60's 

 

I learnt FORTRAN during the late 60's.  IIRC the College computer was operated by punched tape and it occupied a space larger than my living room.  It needed several people to run the thing and it probably had the computing power of a modern-day calculator.

I learnt FORTRAN during the late 60's. IIRC the College computer was operated by punched tape and it occupied a space larger than my living room. It needed several people to run the thing and it probably had the computing power of a modern-day calculator.

That reminded me, thanks. I was trying to recall editing cards on the 1900 but of course we went from coding sheets to punched tape. It was only later on the IBM 360 that I got my real intro to cards.

My wife and I visited the National Museum of Computing ( http://www.tnmoc.org/) at Bletchley Park recently (not the Enigma exhibition but on the same site) and were intrigued to see much kit that one or other of us has owned or used, from the 1900 through a multitude of smaller machines - many mentioned in this thread - to beasts such as a Cray. Much of it works, too. Thoroughly recommended.

Regards, Mike

We used to have a amstard (sp) which used tapes for the games?!?

Took a age to load

We used to have a amstard (sp) which used tapes for the games?!?

Took a age to load

 

High tech - when compared with my Acorn Electron and separate portable cassette tape player!

 

I really wanted an Amstrad but couldn't afford one at the time.

Commodore 64 - Jet Set Willy was the biz!

Jet Set Willy

I suspect that might have a different connotatoon nowadays

Just in case

I had a second hand BBC Acorn thing with a green screen and a separate 5.25 floppy drive.

Still got a brand new boxed in all original packing an Amiga A500 with 1/2 Meg upgrade!

Still got a brand new boxed in all original packing an Amiga A500 with 1/2 Meg upgrade!

 

Had the original A500 and remember going to a computer show at (IIRC) Earls Court to get that upgrade for the discounted price of £99 instead of £149!

 

Just one thing in a list of Amiga additions and upgrades such as the A500 Plus, A520(?) 20mb HD, 68030 expansion with 2mb of 'fast ram', A1200 + internal HD(or was that one of the others?)! Another costly buy was a USRobotics 16.8k modem for £499 and then another £100 spent to upgrade it to 28.8k when that became the new standard. The 16.8k modem was needed to squeeze the extra 2.4k out of the phone line when connected to the >>dial up<< BBS's.

First was a Sinclair +2. Next was a 286, which I programmed a start menu on .

Another Dragon owner.  Actually, two - the second was a backup bought cheap from neighbour.  Both still in the loft (the Dragons, not the neighbour), and working last time out.  Really they were son's who, at 12 or so, was showing interest in this new technology (which became a career!). 

My first was a Sinclair Spectrum+ 48k (plastic key one). It was connected to a Furguson TX RGB 14 inch portable TV like this one I loved it and played lots of games. I think Milimon and Chucky Egg were my favourite. I can remember buying the tapes of games from the market.

 

In the last month I've started clearing out the loft and found it up there along with our 2nd computer an Amega 1200 with lot's of games. I have no idea if any of them work.

Commodore 64 - Jet Set Willy was the biz!

Good game,but too bloody difficult!

Preferred Monty on the Run,bit easier and played better.good sound also!